M. Nourbese Philip

"In November 1781, thee captain of the slave ship Zong ordered that some 150 Africans be murdered by drowning so that the ship's owners could collect insurance monies. Relying entirely on the words of the legal decision Gregson v. Gilbert - the only extant public document related to the massacre of these African slaves - Zong! tells the story that cannot be told yet must be told. Equal parts song, moan, shout, oath, ululation, curse, and chant, Zong! excavates the legal text. Memory, history, and law collide and metamorphose into the poetics of the fragment. Through the innovative use of fugal and counterpointed repetition, Zong! becomes an anti-narrative lament that stretches the boundaries of the poetic form, haunting the spaces of forgetting and mourning the forgotten." --Book Jacket.

Margaret is fourteen and wants to help her best friend, Zulma, escape from Canada and fly back to Tobago to live with her grandmother. But, coming to terms with growing-up, relationships and responsibilities is not quite so straitforward, and the parental threat of 'Good West Indian Discipline' is never far removed. This is a charming, humorous and perceptive tale of adolescence and the friendship of two young African American girls.

A woman, travelling alone through time, Africa, and unnamed lands, searches for Dr. David Livingstone, celebrated by the West as a "discoverer" of Africa. This book explodes Western assumptions about the "silence" of indigenous peoples.

Collection of essays

"Blank is a collection of previously out-of-print essays and new works by one of Canada's most important contemporary writers and thinkers. Through an engagement with her earlier work, M. NourbeSe Philip comes to realize the existence of a repetition in the world: the return of something that, while still present, has become unembedded from the world, disappeared. Her imperative becomes to make us see what has gone unseen, by writing memory upon the margin of history, in the shadow of empire and at the frontier of silence. In heretical writings that work to make the disappeared perceptible, Blank explores questions of race, the body politic,timeliness, recurrence, ongoingness, art, and the so-called multicultural nation. Through these considerations, Philip creates a linguistic form that registers the presence of what has seemingly dissolved, a form that also imprints the loss and the silence surrounding those disappearances in its very presence."--